- Kerry won. Here are the facts.
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- I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one
more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that
messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got
the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico,
it was John Kerry.
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- Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry.
CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent
to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent
to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
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- So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate.
Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't
ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters
don't know.
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- Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters
in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were
simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com,
"An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
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- ---Whose Votes Are Discarded?---
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- And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes,
say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts.
(To learn more, click here.)
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- We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore
with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count.
That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded
179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost
were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely-leaving
a 'hanging chad,'-or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded?
Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated
that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black
folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click
here .)
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- And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The
majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out
from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other
minority citizens.
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- ---The Impact Of Challenges---
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- First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat
wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.'
That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku
Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color
at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll
workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws-almost never used-allowing
party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they
be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits
targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme
Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.
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- ---Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote---
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- Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality-if all
votes are counted-is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com,
I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico,
though not one ballot has yet been counted."
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- How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the
provisional ballots.
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- CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes.
Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent,
'100 percent' of ballots cast.
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- New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate
of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American
and poor precincts-Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same
ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
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- Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic
voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry,
are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting
these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'
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- To read the article in full, click here:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php
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